Deseret News presented Harvard Law School professor Ruth Okediji with the 2026 Deseret News Civic Charity Award on Thursday night at an award gala in Salt Lake City.
“We are delighted to honor Professor Ruth Okediji, whose public life, combined with her deep devotion to God, demonstrates the kind of civil citizenship and charity this award exists to honor,” said Jeff Simpson, president of Deseret Management Corporation.
Professor Okediji has built her scholarship around a single throughline: how intellectual property law shapes opportunity for the people least equipped to negotiate it. A foremost authority on international intellectual property law and a pioneering voice on the role of intellectual property in social and economic development, Professor Okediji is the Jeremiah Smith, Jr., Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Co-Director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She founded and directs Harvard’s Program on Biblical Law and Christian Legal Studies.
Upon receiving the award, Professor Okediji said, “I’m honored by this award from Deseret News … I am humbled and I’m thankful and grateful to so many of you who led the way. I think it’s easy for people to see those in the front and to think of them as teachers. But indeed, you are also followers. Followers of faith that reminds us that it is not us who are great, but those whom we are privileged to serve.”
“Professor Okediji embodies the spirit of the Deseret News Civic Charity Award,” said Burke Olsen, publisher of the Deseret News. “She is a distinguished scholar. As a seven-year-old immigrant to this country who found peace and refuge in books, in a public library, and rising to Harvard Law School. In the chairs she has held and the institutions that she started, she’s found a way to marry who she is as a person of faith with her public intellectualism, and she calls on the rest of us to do the same.”
Created in 2025, the celebratory 175th year of the Deseret News, the Deseret News Civic Charity Award honors those whose life and work demonstrate how faith informs citizenship, how strong families strengthen communities and how civility enables democratic discourse.
